Sarah Connor Chronicles - Week 3 of 8

There is a company out of California that has developed a camera that can actually see into the future.

Essentially, it has to do with tachyon particles. They’re apparently just as important here as they are in Star Trek when they’re employed every week for some new piece of technology. Something about the waveforms and how the light hits the camera… for example, imagine yourself taking a picture with a regular camera. The light beams (specifically, photons) travel forward through time, hit your lens (and your eyes) and an image is imprinted on the film. You essentially have a snapshot of the past, right? Well, operating along those same principles is the theory that tachyon particles actually travel backward in time. So when a certain company–in this case, EniTech Research–comes up with a prototype that uses tachyons instead of photons, you have the ability take snapshots of the future.

I’m not sure of the science behind it, but the properties of tachyons operate in a way that allows the camera to see exactly 1191 days into the future (3 years and some months, roughly).

How cool is that!? Imagine sitting in your apartment and taking a photo of your living room and getting a picture of a party the future tenants will have. Or taking a photo of a piece of land you just purchased to see what your future house will look like! Or, if you were patient and punctual enough, taking a picture of a mirror where you’d make a point of standing in front of 3 years later… you would see what you look like in 3 years!

But what if you took a picture of yourself in the mirror, wrote yourself a reminder to stand there in 3 years, got the picture, and nobody was there? What if you took a picture of your living room and saw a mysterious looking figure glaring back at you? What if you took a picture of your house-under-construction only to see a bare spot of land?

What happened?

Of course, EniTech is just a fictional company and another example of how television writers are branching their ideas across a lot of different media. Just as The Hanso Foundation’s website for Lost, or Slusho’s website for Alias and Cloverfield, we have EniTech Research for The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

They have developed a camera that can see into the future, and have been “concerned” at the results, because apparently every picture they’ve taken has shown something strange. When taking a picture of San Francisco, for example, the resulting image shows the city completely destroyed.

When taking a picture of a housing complex in 2008…

The image that develops from 2011 looks like this…

They don’t know it, but they’re looking at a post-Judgment Day world, where the machines have already taken over.

It’s going to be interesting to see if Sarah, John and the gang end up working with EniTech Research in the show, because they’d likely be a strong ally. Of course, if their name really is EniTech (as in, Initech from Office Space), it’s going to be hard to take them seriously.

Props to A Mike Life for bringing this to my attention!

As for tonight’s episode, nothing like that really happened (yet!?), but, it was still pretty good. (spoilers from here on out)

There continue to be a couple inconsistencies, like, if Cameron the Terminator Girl was really in high school before she found John, wouldn’t she already kind of know how to behave? She is a lot different than the girl from the first episode who smiled and introduced herself, then later caught up with him in the hallway and was all flirty saying things like “sucks for you!” But it was kind of funny to see her in the girls’ bathroom tonight trying to adapt to the culture, calling things “tight.”

Even though it’s the Sarah Connor chronicles I hope they’ll go into more of Cameron’s quest to appear more human. I don’t think it’ll be like Data in Star Trek who wanted to actually become human, but developing the desire to be someone’s friend doesn’t seem out of her… programming. I was hoping she’d save the suicidal girl before she jumped.

It was creepy to see the T-800 (Cromarty) looking for skin. This is, of course, the terminator that got caught in their temporal wake and traveled to 2008 with Sarah, John, and Cameron, unbeknownst to them and without skin. The scene in the bathroom with the tub full of blood when he’s just a metal skeleton standing there creeped me out. Even creepier to see that he needed to take the guy’s eyes.

And I know I keep talking about Bear McCreary (the composer) when I write these Sarah Connor blogs, but I have to point out that I really liked how he used that ominous industrial-sounding chord from T2 whenever the T-800 was doing something nasty. It was all T2 meets Battlestar Galactic-y sounding and gave the show a little bit of the credibility it still needs to last past week eight.

Did you watch it? What did you think?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

A few months ago, the brilliance at NBC/Universal officially ended their contract with iTunes after Apple refused to raise the price of a download to $4.99 per episode (NBC still claims, by the way, that there is no profit to give to the writers). They vowed to create their own video service that would compete, and they did. It’s called Hulu, and is in private beta testing right now. As far as I know, if you go to hulu.com you might still be able to get an invitation code to use the service before it’s “officially released.”

I signed up early and have been playing around with it… I wouldn’t call it anything like iTunes, but I see how it might steal away some customers. A lot of entire shows are available for free, right on the site, and not just ones from NBC. Fox, and a few other cable networks, are on there as well. And you can’t download them or otherwise take them with you (yet), but the quality is 10x better than anything you’d find on YouTube and it even (surprisingly) lets you embed the video files into your own site, like I’m about to do.

What’s even cooler, is that it lets you embed specific clips of the episodes.

Like so (don’t watch if you haven’t yet seen the last episode of Heroes):

That’s the last part of the finale of Heroes, which I finally watched yesterday. I think, based on the un-Heroes-like editing and Lifetime style montage, that that’s the part of the episode that was re-edited to serve as the finale because of the WGA strike.

I have to say, as bored as I was with the first half of the season (like I said here), the second half picked up. (Technically, I guess I should be using the term “volume” instead of “season,” since season two might still continue after the strike is over.) All of the reasons I was losing interest were eventually addressed by the series creator so things are turning around, I think.

The one remaining gripe I have with the show is that there seems to be little lasting consequences. With the exception of a few very minor characters, there have been no real deaths on the show. Don’t get me wrong — death just for death’s sake isn’t required — but people get shot, fall from buildings, even explode in a nuclear blast, and are able to just walk away from it twenty minutes later after some dramatic music.

I had tears in my eyes (shut up) when Claire’s dad, Noah, died. There is some good development! I thought. Noah was a great character… we thought he may be evil during season one, and, I guess he kind of was. But all he ever really wanted to do was protect Claire and his family, and seeing Claire’s reaction to him being shot point blank in the face was a very powerful scene. Claire vowing to avenge his death and bring down the company — whatever it takes — was a pretty good direction for her character to go. I was excited to see where things were going to go next after the death of such a pivotal character, and then… the last ten seconds of the episode was him hooked up to an IV being fed his daughter’s indestructo-blood, miraculously healing, and then sitting upright whispering profanities.

Sylar is another one! He should have been killed off at the end of season one! Except the camera pans down after all the action to see a trail of blood leading into a sewer. His character hasn’t really made me hate him like a good villain should, but he might be off too a good start after killing Maya. No, wait, he didn’t kill her. She was miraculously healed, too. There I was, thinking they might actually kill off one of the least liked characters in order to help Sylar’s development along. Heh.

Actually, this “no death” thing isn’t entirely accurate. DL died in a flashback showing what happened between season one and two, which actually was pretty heroic and for once made the title “Heroes” seem to fit the show.

So, although Nathan is shot by an unknown assassin, the drama and suspense of that scene just wasn’t there since there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be healed soon anyway.

Although, I was pumped that he was going to say, “I have the ability to fly,” which would have (hopefully) added a whole new layer to the show: the public calling him a lunatic until he actually flew away, at which point this whole “mutant phenomenon” would be made public, X-Men style.

Oh! And my prediction about Adam was right on! The speculation out there was that he could either travel through time or has lived 400 years. It’s very cool that he actually lived 400 years. Imagine being born in the year 1600 and realizing you’d never die, meeting someone who claimed to be from the future, and then, 340 years later, you actually meet them at the point of time they came from originally. Trippy!

Speaking of trippy: Later, I’ll get into my theory about how Hiro must be a space/time anchor since he apparently can’t travel through time and come back to his point of origin seconds later… in other words, when he spends 6 months in the past, he’s gone for 6 months in real-time. ::thinks:: Hmmm, yeah. Later.

Here’s another clip from Hulu, having nothing to do with Heroes:

Keep in mind that as of right now, the studio is the only one making money off of this thing. They sell ad time to companies who slap their logo all over the video and play commercials in the middle of episodes and, well, that’s the whole reason the WGA is on strike — to get some of that action. Right now, writers, actors, directors, editors, staff, etc., are paid nothing when you watch their work on Hulu.com. Since it’s in Beta and I’m able to give feedback on how to improve the service my main complaint is going to be that the writers aren’t getting a cut of the profits and if they don’t I’m not going to use the service after it’s officially released. Take that, evil studio heads! That’ll learn you!

Continue Reading...

Somehow I ended up on a site called “The Wayback Machine.” Have you heard of this? It looks like someone brilliantly took the initiative back in 1996 to start archiving what seems to be 95% of the web’s content, from that point on.

Case in point… cyberadam.net, a website I ran my freshman year of college. I assumed it was long dead, long gone. Every now and then I wonder what exactly it looked like, how I arranged things, etc., but I deleted everything when I got tired of running it. Turns out someone saved a backup.

Remember the state of the web in 1996? I don’t either. I’m pretty sure I first came online in 1997 or 1998. Obviously things have changed since then, I just have a hard time remembering exactly how much. Remember “shockwave,” Flash’s predecessor? This university’s website made me laugh out loud a little. The primary text on the website says:

[Our] web site is highly graphical, with the intention of making it easier to navigate. Each main area, and many of the detail areas contain image maps, that is, areas of a graphic that are links to the detail information. Simply place your mouse cursor over the desired topic, click the mouse button, and you will be sent to the appropriate page.

I know things weren’t yet second nature but it’s still just funny to me.

Facebook.com was, until mid-2005, the home of an “intranet directory software solution,” until late 2005 when the site we all know and love either acquired the name or had dibs on it when the previous owner’s contract expired.

Collegehumor.com looked much different in 2001.

Residual payments for streaming online media wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye’s of networks like NBC and Comedy Central, though Comedy Central appears to have pioneered the whole thing by allowing visitors to refresh a page in order to see the latest “screen grab.” I wonder if that was for “promotional use?”

Blogging was still new and didn’t really emerge until late 1998, early 1999. LiveJournal apparently didn’t have an editor, as their main page came complete with tpyos. Xanga looks like it beat del.icio.us to the whole online bookmark thing before it morphed into “The Easiest Way to Publish Online! It’s called Weblogging,” the site says, bolding the phrase like a new vocabulary word in elementary text books, “and you’re going to love it.”

And what do you know?  We did!

Then again, some sites never change.

Continue Reading...

For the past, um… well, I guess… 10 years or so, whenever I’ve gotten bored and found nothing else to do online I’ve often ended up at StarTrek.com. It’s not the best of websites, and definitely is not the most exhaustive Star Trek site on the internet, but since it was the official, network owned site they’d often have breaking news and photos before anybody else.

Well, it turns out those breaking news and photos might have gotten them in trouble.

I thought it was a little odd that a studio-owned site would follow the WGA strike since, you know, it’s pretty much general consensus that the studios are the ones being dicks. Their coverage of “Star Trek Day” at the picket lines was very pro-WGA.

So, it wasn’t really “surprise” as much as “shock” that I felt when I went to StarTrek.com today and read the following message from the web team:

12.14.2007
Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team

Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.

We don’t know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years.

If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com - we hope someone at CBS will read them.

Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.

So there you have it.

First the cancellation of Enterprise and then the shutdown of the entire StarTrek.com website–man, Trek isn’t doing too good these days. But with the JJ Abrams’ movie still in production, I’m guessing the studio is taking this opportunity to make www.startrek.com into the site for just that movie. Since it’s a “reboot,” my guess is that they are trying to lure in “the next generation” of fans by erasing the vast Star Trek mythology that’s been established over the past 40 years.

They’ll never come out and say either of these things, though. Saying they fired the creative team because of their pro-WGA stance would make them look like asses, and saying they want to “reboot” Star Trek would make a lot of established fans angry. Instead, they’ll say something like “to better serve your needs, we’ve restructured the often dense and thoroughly comprehensive Star Trek universe in order to offer a better user entertainment soultion.”

Rage… rage against the machine!

UPDATE:  Here is a picture of the people who ran the site and who will no doubt be very concerned about how they’ll make it through Christmas (er, sorry, “the holidays.”)

Continue Reading...

Sirius and XM are merging. WTF, mate?

It has been speculated about for a while but I never actually thought it would happen. There are pros and cons, for example, now that there is only one satellite radio company, they can likely jack up their prices a few dollars, and crush any would-be competitor, Wal-Mart style. On the other hand, the content I’m now getting will double, I think satellite radio as a whole will have more credibility, and, who knows, any competitor would have to revolutionize the industry to gain an advantage.

(Want to hear my idea? Good. Eventually I think all this copyright bullshit mess will be straightened out, and people will have Satellite Radio’s that include local channels much like Satellite Television does now. Anyway, the way the entertainment industry is going, people want things on-demand and with them at all times. So I think the radio of the future will be a device you can take with you anywhere that will have hundreds of channels like it does now that you can listen to, and if you really like a song you can choose to download it. It will also have a menu that you can scroll through and purchase things, iTunes style. The same will eventually be true for your television. They will have removable hard drives - or whatever the futuristic storage equivalent is - and you will just download everything or have it on-demand from a cable company or something.  ADAM PREDICTS THE FUTURE: This will all be kicked off by Apple when they introduce their own next-gen gaming/media console in 2013.)

They sent me an email and at first I thought it was a dream or something because it was so surprising. Kind of like how JJ Abrams is in charge of the new Star Trek movie. I’m not saying “it’s a dream come true,” because that would be dorky.

*****

In other news, here’s a good theory about Lost:

DO BLACK HOLES EXPLAIN IT ALL?

Simply put, this not-so-simple theory posits that the electromagnetic anomaly beneath The Hatch was a black hole. No, I’m not joking. Check out thetailsection.com, which has been hosting a proverbial symposium on the subject since ”Not In Portland” aired.

THE CLUE: An Other named Aldo was seen reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The book was open to the page that discusses black holes.

IF IT WALKS LIKE A BLACK HOLE, AND TALKS LIKE A BLACK HOLE — IT MUST BE A BLACK HOLE! From Wikipedia: ”A black hole is defined to be a region of space-time where escape to the outside universe is impossible…. [O]bservers outside the event horizon cannot see any events which may be happening within the event horizon… Within the black hole is a singularity, an anomalous place where matter is compressed to the degree that the known laws of physics no longer apply to it.” Sounds like The Island, doesn’t it?

WHAT THIS EXPLAINS: Among other things, why Desmond was unable to sail away from the island; why the island is seemingly invisible to the outside world; why the island is a twilight zone for physics-defying phenomena; why The Hatch ”imploded” instead of ”exploded.”

WHAT THIS DOESN’T EXPLAIN: Among other things, why the Others have been able to commute off the island via submarine; and why Locke, Eko, and Desmond weren’t sucked into the anomaly along with The Hatch.

POKING HOLES IN BLACK HOLE THEORY: A key contention of this young, still-in-process theory is that The Button inside The Hatch was regulating the awesome energies radiating from this black hole/anomaly. But if pushing that computer key was really so darn important — like ‘’saving the world” important, according to Kelvin — why didn’t Dharma devise a more reliable Button-pushing system? Two guys in a hatch (volunteers, really) following instructions from a dubious industrial film that conspicuously fails to spell out the stakes? THAT is Earth’s defense against the catastrophic consequences of a throbbing wound in the fabric of reality? Please.

THE ALDO FACTOR: What should we make of the fact that the Hawking/Black Hole clue came attached to a guy named Aldo? Perhaps more proof for the theory. ”Aldo” means ”elder, older one” in German — interesting, given Aldo the Other looks like he’s barely 18. But are looks deceiving? Given the mounting clues suggesting some kind of time-warp phenomenon (”Mittelos” — the Others-backed company that recruited Juliet to the island — is an anagram for LOST TIME), maybe the Island-indigenous Others are much older than they look.

SOME ”OTHER” ADVICE: The literalism with which the Hawking/black-hole clue has been interpreted and applied reminds me of something that Michael Emerson (Ben/Henry Gale) told me when I visited the Lost set in January:

”The little tidbits may not necessarily be revealing of the master plan, but they’re usually not empty, either. The whole thing about my original name, Henry Gale. Okay, so it’s Dorothy’s uncle [from The Wizard of Oz], so you think, where are they going with that? Well, they don’t have to go anywhere with it. Just free associate — about her trip to Oz, a fantasyland that has certain purgatorial dimensions… I don’t think [the executive producers] stay up all night researching this stuff. I think it just falls out of them, and it kind of thickens and enriches the whole.”

APPLYING BEN’S WISDOM TO BLACK HOLE THEORY:  Saying ”the island is a black hole” is as misguided as saying ”the island is Oz.” In fact, it might be as misguided as saying ”Oz is a black hole.” After all, couldn’t Oz be described as a ”region of space-time” where ”the laws of physics no longer apply”? Instead, think analogously. The Island isn’t a black hole — it’s just like a black hole.

THEN AGAIN: Isn’t Ben a big fat liar?

*****

I bought an Xbox 360 the other day. It’s pretty much the coolest thing ever.

Anybody who knows me knows that Mortal Kombat is my fravrite. So discovering I could download and play UMK3 with other people around the world was pretty much the highlight of my day. Paperboy, too.

There is a new game for the 360 called Crackdown that I want to play, and dammit, some day I will.

Anyway, I’m officially out. Like Britney Spears’ mind.

What happened ?

Continue Reading...